Melts In Your Mouth

In true Daddy fashion, when I was out of the house the other night, Lehr secured his title of "Fun Daddy".

He pulled out the chocolate chips and let Ruby get her hands on some sweet goodness.

Seems like she took to it pretty well.

Ruby-Cube

What an eventful time it is with this girl right now! This is not even a therapy update because these things are not all therapy-driven, BUT our lives are so intertwined with therapy, that honestly every minute of her day is shaped in some (therapy-derived) day. Soooo....update on Ruby or therapy or both, I guess.

Newest tricks for my girl include:

• Dancing. Not really dancing, but she's not responded to music much until this last month. Now she will stop what she's doing and swing her arm (usually right) straight out in front of her when she hears music playing. Love, love, love.
• Standing Unassisted. Really. She has been letting go of whatever support she's used in the standing position for quite some time, but lately she will 'climb' up one of us when we're down on the ground and then right herself to a standing position. She pushed herself to standing from Eli's knee the other day and he was SOO excited.
• Walking. Wait...what? OK, not really. BUT she took her first two (totally unassisted, totally independent) steps this week. At least three separate times in the same day too! 
• Eating Unassisted. Sorta. Ruby's been rocking the feed-herself-with-a-loaded-fork for months now, but I've been experimenting with spoons lately too. While it is a messy endeavor, it's starting to pay off. AND she has her bowl-to-mouth accuracy down because of all of the fork practice.
• Signs. Oh, how many she has. In the last few weeks Ruby has picked up several and uses them often. She still does "all done", but it's more intentional and recognizable now. She will sign "fish" when we are reading a book with a fish photo in it, but only when prompted. She will sign "please" all day long and very emphatically. Usually it's a flipping over hand across her chest, but if she can reach her belly (as in, when she's not in her high chair), she will rub her belly like crazy. And "eat". She will bring her hand to her mouth to tell you she wants to eat. Again, and again.
• Imitation. Ruby is showing us that she can be a very quick learner in every portion of her day. While we always put lotion on her after her bath, I just realized a few weeks ago that I never show her how she can do it herself. It only took one time and now she rubs her arms and chest as soon as she sees the lotion and/or bath soap. Love that little sponge!!

Halloween

Awesomeness.

Nope, not the actual day, but the picture.

Finally. FINALLY. This was the third year I tried to convince my crew to do some type of group dress up. In the last 36 months we've discussed everything from Little Mermaid to Cowboys to Toy Story to ET...

As I have in the past, I started talking to them early, to try and get the idea cemented before summer was even over. This year we gravitated towards Despicable Me and it stuck. Around Labor Day I told them we were not changing our minds because I was going to start looking for costumes. (No complaints from them!)

We had a few homemade minions for the Little 5 Points parade, but they didn't make it to our Halloween celebration for some reason. (Glad I spent so long working on them!!) We did NOT win the family costume contest in our neighborhood, but I'm told we were a very close second. (The winners were lego people; they were awesome and very creative, so no hard feelings.)

The kids trick-or-treated until it started pouring on us. Lehr then ran home with Ruby (yes, in his Gru costume) and got the car. He picked up about 8 people (including Eli, but not Maddux - she wanted to walk in the rain with me), but the rain was brief. The kids continued trick-or-treating while I put Ruby to bed.

The bad news: even though the kids liked our dress up, they want to do their 'own thing' next year. Sigh.